Hermanos y Cuñadas

We’ve been at the apartment for a week now. First of all, there was just Sharon and myself, but on Sunday last we were joined by both my brothers and wife/partner. Andrew and Debbie (partner) live in Perth Western Australia, but it is their third visit to this part of the world. Peter and Linder live close to us in Huddersfield, but they too have been here once before.

However, neither brother (or their better halves) had been to Mijas before and just one had been to Ronda – so yesterday we took off for Ronda.

We took the train from Torreblanca Station, just at the bottom of our hill, right into Malaga – Maria Zambrano station. Others, possibly wanting to take a similar journey may wish to come up out of the Cercanias (C) line [Fuengirola – Malaga-Centro] platform and into the huge Maria Zambrano shopping centre, which is at street level. Continue around the corner and into the glass lined ticket office; don’t waste time trying to buy the tickets from a machine – you need the ticket office.  This area has a numbered service system, so do also remember to take a numbered ticket before you approach the counter (when it is your turn).

The train runs just once a day from Malaga to Ronda, at 10:05am.  It returns from Ronda to Malaga at 16:50pm – each way takes approximately 2 hours. The return ticket costs €23.20 for these two named trains. The platform is then just a short walk away and the train is superbly comfortable. The route passes out of suburban Malaga and into increasingly agricultural/rural Spain. We often felt that each station we stopped at, should have tumble weed blowing across the deserted tracks, yet each stop seemed to have a large concentration of housing around it.

Unbeknown to us, the train line passed through Caminito del Rey and alongside the gravity defying walkway, first opened by King Alfonso XIII in 1921. We tried and better tried to take photographs of this but were thwarted by the intense reflection of the sun in the carriage window.

Ronda was hot.  Very hot. So we moved from shade to shade as much as we could, whilst still trying to show Peter and Linda the sights of the city. We had lunch in the main square under a water-sprayed canopy and a beer in a local bar near the station.

Today, Wednesday, we visited Mijas.  This was a mistake.

Mijas is such a pleasure to walk around and for most times in the year parking is easy enough. However, today was horrendous. Suffice to say we will avoid July visits by car in future. The town was buzzing despite the continuous structural and road works that have been going on since at least last October, when we first saw them. Everyone seemed to enjoy our visit, Especially our windy yet panoramic lunch.